


Both Human and Not

by henghost



Series: Amy Obsession [8]
Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Alternate Universe - Normal High School, Angst, Drinking, Drug Use, Dubious Consent, F/F, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Self-Harm, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-18
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:02:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27617360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/henghost/pseuds/henghost
Summary: Some vignettes from Amy's perspective during her senior year of high school, mostly about Victoria. (No superpowers.)
Relationships: Amy Dallon | Panacea | Red Queen/Victoria Dallon | Glory Girl | Antares/Original Character(s)
Series: Amy Obsession [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1527380
Comments: 3
Kudos: 17





	Both Human and Not

**Author's Note:**

> First AU! Haven't read anything by Wildbow in months but I can't stop thinking about Amy. One of my favorite characters in all of fiction. It's true that one of Wildbow's favorite books is LOLITA.

_FIRST DAY_

Night before day one of Senior Year I spend not sleeping but sprawled corpselike on my carpet all a-sweat. It happens every year. Bad nerves despite the fact I’ve got nothing to worry about. The prospect of all those people after so much sweet solitude (or sweeter semi-solitude), well . . . there’s nothing to do but wait it out. I watch every minute pass in pixel red.

At last as the light goes from navy to gray I give in and enter my closet full of anxiolytics: here buried under socks I’ve got a bottle of stolen Ativan, behind a bundle of shoes my Box, and in the corner my pinprick peephole. (Please withhold your judgement.) Quick heart-thudding glance — yes — there she is with hair glimmering gold from the low morning glow, half a foot stuck outside the covers to show me its Roman toes, and the knots in my chest begin to come undone. She twitches, then, and I have to cover the hole again. 

The Ativan I took from Mark a couple months ago. I hold the bottle tight to muffle its gravelly rattling; lots and lots of pills left because I’m scared to do it too often. But it’s a special occasion today, so down go two of the speck-sized things, one milligram total. Mom’s got caffeine in a pill in her purse, and I creep down creaking stairs to sneak some, and come right back up.

Door locked I prise off the Box’s cardboard top and take what you might call a lascivious sniff at its contents. To earn a spot in the Box is difficult. Not just any old discarded food-wrapper, hygiene item. Special things. Items which I can convince myself she left unguarded on purpose, for my personal use — because her kindness knows no bounds. Purple scrunchie left on my bed after a late-night heart-to-heart, complete with loose flaxen strands. Little pink razor, her first. And what I consider my _piéce de resistance:_ a long black lip-gloss wand, whose tip I touch now to my own lips, and shudder. I spend the hour left till the others get up this way, tableau vivant in my head of her puckered cupid’s bow, the caffeine come-up tingling along my tired spine, forgetting what scared me so much in the first place, as though it were only a nightmare. . . . 

A little later I listen to Victoria shower and dress and sigh and sigh and sigh. We slurp cereal wordless, face to face. My eyes oscillate between half-lidded and saucer-sized. She frowns at me. In the bathroom I stick cotton balls in the pill bottle and slip it into my thick coat’s inner pocket, and then it’s out into the heatless sprawl, the piss-smelling bus stop. 

While we wait jittering for warmth I say, “Victoria, would you hug me?”

“You’ve got bags under your eyes,” she says. 

“No sleep.”

“Amy you’ve had literally a dozen first days of school. What could you possibly be nervous about?” 

I sort of shrug. She hugs me. The cold’s gone in an instant, as is the last remaining tension. This goes on any longer I’ll melt, I’m thinking, but here’s the gassy screeching bus to save me. When she lets me go the inevitability of it all hits me with the wind, and water wells at the corners of my eyes. She gets the window seat and I the aisle, and at one point I attempt to place my head on her shoulder and she rolls her eyes and shoves me away and puts her cheek to the shaking glass, and when I’m sure she’s asleep I slip myself another Ativan.

_AP ENGLISH_

I find myself thigh to thigh with Victoria. Dim yellow eco-friendly light across the tables. They are _tables_ and not _desks,_ and they are arranged loosely, organically — rows are anathema here at Arcadia, as are lectures and the like. Across the room I spot a certain Dean Stansfield make eyes at Victoria, and I finger the pills. One Mr. McCrae paces grinning at the front of the class. He’s going, “. . . We’re going to talk this semester about the Great American Novel — specifically after the end of World War II. We’re going to discuss what sort of work might warrant such a title. We’re going to discuss whether such a title is even a useful concept, whether it’s even a _real thing._ We’ll start with Vladimir Nabokov’s _Lolita,_ which is one of my personal favorites, and don’t read too much into that, ha ha. If you have not already purchased a copy please do so by Monday. . . .”

The suggestive gestures between V and D only escalate as the class clips on. By the bell he’s gotten his tongue involved. Then as we shuffle out he takes her arm and escorts her through the hallway (isn’t he always so _gallant,_ Amy!), and I’m left watching them disappear into the hot throng of bodies. I’ve got Computer Science next but I ditch it in favor of finding a stall in which to pop another Ativan and sob.

_SUMMER ANECDOTE I_

Vicky and I did all our bookshopping a week before the first day. We made an outing of it. A stop at Coldstone Creamery before Barnes & Noble, where she grimaced at me when I splurged on birthday cake plus Twix. I gained nearly fifteen pounds this summer. Lots of meat pizza ordered in, very little movement. Too hot to leave the house, really. Also too dangerous — gang activity, everyone said, was on the rise. But no one harmed us at Coldstone. I remember giggle-fits when some Oreo stuck to her upper lip, and she failed and failed to lick it away.

Then we went to get two copies of _Lolita,_ and when we found the N’s in the fiction section Victoria opted to look through the rest of this guy’s bibliography. She pulled a broad yellow-black tome from the shelf upon whose dust-jacket was written: _Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle,_ and went to read the copy. 

“Amy,” she said. “Listen to this: ‘ _Ada, or Ardor_ is one of Nabokov’s greatest masterpiece’s, the virtuosic culmination of his career as a novelist. At once fable, epic, and erotic catalogue, the tale of Van Veen and his lifelong love affair with his _sister_ Ada represents the highest caliber of twentieth-century American literature.’ Sister, Amy!”

“So?” I said, sweating.

“I don’t know. I mean, I never knew there was so much pedophilia and incest in the — the _canon._ ”

I didn’t say anything. She flicked through the thin pages and squinted at the flowery prose. Then she said, “I guess it is romantic, in a way. Forbidden love. As long as she doesn’t get pregnant or anything.”

And without thinking I answered, “That wouldn’t be a problem in our case!”

“Our case?” she said, and gave me a look I spent several sleepless nights trying to decipher. We paid for the books and I went home and she went to spend the evening with Dean.

_HOUSE_

See the Dallon Household. Long thin brownstone slotted between two others just like it. See its stoop. Upon the stoop sit pots to hold roses. The roses grow for weeks and weeks until they aren’t so interesting anymore, and their carcasses remain for months longer. “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Is this true, too, of houses? Our house is unhappy — I know it for certain. It whines and groans. Snow pools on the flat top and slips into the attic and falls to the space between the three bedrooms and finally drips in marble-sized drops onto the tiled kitchen floor. Tears. All its crevices seem somehow distinct. I have never encountered the same geometries in another building. In my bedroom by the short fire-escape I hold the house, and it holds me. We are kindred souls.

Here come the Dallon daughters (or perhaps Dallon daughter-and-a-half) to grab milk and cookies with which we may rebuild our school-sore muscles. Vicky says, “I wish we lived somewhere else.”

“You mean another city?”

“Another house. A lot of good things happened to me in this house, but it’s like the walls are _depressed._ It’s like I might wake up dangling over the sidewalk because the whole place hanged itself in the night.”

“I like it,” I say. “I do wish the ventilation was better. Nearly died this summer.”

“That’s my fault, I think. I’ve lived here so long my hotness has seeped into the foundation.”

“Maybe that’s why the place is suicidal. . . .”

“Don’t be jealous. If you’re jealous maybe let that cookie be your last. I have to go. Dean’s parents are out of town.”

She’s out the door as quick as she came in, and I end up eating three cookies just to spite her, mumbling something about genetics. I hate the color of my hair. Then after the day’s fifth Ativan I read the first chapter of _Lolita._ As I drift away I write my own version: Victoria, light of my life, fire of my — well, you get the picture. . . .

_BASKETBALL GAME_

Vicky’s captain of the varsity girl’s basketball team this year. She plays point-guard. Her jersey is black on white and has a big three-oh in bold on the back. I’ve seen every game she’s played. She’s amazing. Tonight the Arcadia Knights’ opponent is their old rival the Winslow Hornets. Sweat smell hangs noxious over the lacquered court. I purchase a hot dog with relish although I’ve already had dinner, and I can feel fat wobbling under my arms. I relish the taste! A butch woman all in stripes throws the ball skyward and blows her whistle, and up jumps Victoria with her ponytailed hair like a comet’s trail to toss it back to her teammates, and I clap my hands till they’re red. Mark and Carol on my either side aren’t quite so enthusiastic.

Down there in the front row is Dean and his posse. Four broad and raucous boys. Dean is nothing if not supportive: even the lowliest layup from our Knights earns from him a shriek to shatter glass. And when toward the end of the third quarter Victoria hits a three-pointer he does a sort of jig with the mascot. Times like these I understand his admirers, who are myriad — I think I spot a little freshman at the game solely to admire him; he does not spot her. I hate him most for his kindness.

The score’s close in quarter four. Vicky’s got the ball in a key possession in the last five minutes, and she opts not to pass, instead fades away for a jump-shot, at which point this tall pale girl swipes at her forearm, and both tumble to the sweat-slick floor. Some growling, some staring: Victoria’s got this face like she’s been taking steroids. Ref awards two free-throws, and as she bends and dribbles the girl who swiped her calls, “Slut!” as if to distract her, and the scene devolves from there. She makes the ball a projectile and sprints after it, and all the teammates aren’t quick enough to prevent an open-handed slap, a knee to the stomach. I stand straight up at the sight but can’t get myself to move. Carol makes a noise like concern but Mark’s asleep by now. At last the other Arcadia girls are able to pull Vicky back, and she calms down enough to play out the rest of the match.

But it’s all for nothing. Arcadia loses by six.

It’s a quiet car-ride back. The scent of post-basketball Victoria gives me comfort like you wouldn’t believe, and in the backseat I reach out to hold her hand, and when she relents I try to absorb as much of its sweat as possible. 

Carol goes, “Victoria, I thought toward the first half you should not have tried for so many threes as you did. Your success percentage isn’t quite high enough for that.”

Victoria doesn’t say anything. She squeezes my hand in anger, though, which is pleasant. That night I hear her having phone sex with Dean through the wall, which leaves me shamefully aroused, and that tangy hand comes in handy.

_FATHERS_

I have two fathers, although of course I’ve only met one. The father I know means well, but that’s the best I could say about him. I learned more about him the first time I saw his medicine cabinet than he’s ever told me himself. Here were Lexapro, Wellbutrin, Effexor, Prozac, Abilify, Risperdal, Xanax, Ambien, Valium, Ativan (to which I alluded earlier), Lithium, and at the very back a couple Quaaludes. Suddenly so much about him made sense. Since I’ve known him he’s gone through three jobs and two hospitalizations, which Carol told me were for routine exploratory surgeries, but were quite obviously not. I will say, in terms of physical/verbal affection, he’s much better than her overall. 

My birth-father I think about a lot. I wonder what was so wrong in his genetic code to make me the way I am. The conclusion I’ve reached recently is that he must have been (must _be_ ) a rapist. He must have raped my birth-mother and for reasons religious or monetary or legal or moral she couldn’t have me aborted, and without the resources to raise me put me up for adoption. This solution makes sense on more levels the more I think about. I, of course, could never rape anybody, but I think in some respects I have a rapist’s pathology. Can fantasies be hereditary?

_TWO CLASSES TOGETHER_

Victoria and I have two classes together this semester. Before English she asks me to summarize the section of _Lolita_ we were supposed to read, and I tell her (spoilers) about the sedative Humbert intends to use on his newly motherless prize. “Gross,” she says. Mr. McCrae says of the passage, “The events described here are ugly beyond belief. And yet — and yet! — the description of the events itself is eminently beautiful. Gone in our modern literary landscape is this shamelessly purple style. . . .”

Toward the end he asks us all a question: “So, class, what do you all think Nabokov _wants_ of us? Is his motive to get us to despise Humbert despite his charming voice? Or is the pedophilia itself as secondary to the novel as fishing is to _Moby Dick_?”

And only because I am by this point about three milligrams high I raise my hand. “Yes, Amy.”

“I think it’s the perspective that’s important. Humbert’s like beautifying his actions. Intellectualizing, _justifying._ He denies his victim’s perspective. If he wrote the book from Dolores’s perspective it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting. If Humbert was any less quick-witted, smart-sounding, it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting. That’s the power of books, is what Nabokov’s saying. That’s the danger of empathy.”

In the passing period, though, Victoria disagrees with me. She says, “I think if I were Lolita I’d want to write a sequel that was from my perspective. I’d want to write about my trauma.”

And I say, “That’s why you’re failing the class, Vicky.”

Our second class together is Biology. Today’s agenda features frog dissection, and Victoria picks me as her partner (I think mostly out of pity). Something strange happens when she puts the scalpel to the dead thing’s chest. Maybe it’s only the drugs but I get this woozy sensation, a dizzy spell, and then a sort of half hallucination: I see _myself_ as the frog, and I see, feel her cutting me down the middle, cutting through the bundle of nerves at my navel, and all at once I’m flushed and gasping for breath. I tell the teacher I’ve got to get to the bathroom. It’s an emergency.

I wash my face and then get into a stall to dry heave over the toilet. Then when I turn to leave the plastic toilet-paper container attached to the wall happens to collide with my crotch, at which point I notice my wetness, and long story short I spend the next ten minutes or so rubbing my cunt against the box’s dull curves. When I exit a girl I’ve never met before hands me an Advil. I take the bus home and miss two and a half classes total. Victoria’s yelling that night re: how she failed the assignment doesn’t scare me one bit because by that point I’ve already used up my capacity for terror. I get to sleep only after another three milligrams, using a pair of her old underwear as a blindfold.

_SCARS_

I counted: I’ve got seven scars in all. Two along my waist from a swingset incident circa my tenth year, a long one on my clavicle from a similarly childish run-in with a tree. Fourth can be found across the vein which runs through the underside of my forearm — self-inflicted. The other three are in a neat row on my upper left thigh, from when I realized I couldn’t go around in long sleeves the rest of my life. See me bent naked on the cool bathroom floor, razor in hand, wincing. This was maybe two years ago; I’ve stopped since then. Other self-destructive habits have presented themselves.

I don’t want to be too grandiose about it. I dislike myself, is what I’ll say. I understand I’m not so unique, in that regard, but still this fact plays a massive role in my life. I am redeemed only by _her,_ and when I disrespect her, even in thought — dirty thought — the dislike escalates, let’s say, and the only way to end the escalation is with something dramatic, hence the razor.

My obsession is not only unnatural, I’ve realized, but _supernatural._ It’s been there since I can remember (it has only been since the peak of puberty, though, that it has included the more sordid bits). There is no physical reason, and therefore the source must be metaphysical. It is at times a dangerous demon, other times a guardian angel, but always present. It’ll be with me as long as these scars, this aura, this gift/curse from my creator. I’d do anything for a cure.

_HALLOWEEN, SCARY MOVIES_

Halloween rolls around and falls on a Saturday. Vicky and I etch out a compromise: she will marathon horror movies with me during the day if at night I promise to come ( _costumed!_ ) to Dean’s party. Becoming something of a film buff is another thing I did over the summer. I’d gone my whole life without having a favorite director, somehow. Now I absolutely have a favorite director: John Carpenter. Who else? We sit on the couch and I wire my laptop with its library of pirated flicks to the outdated TV on the coffee table. First up — because it is a requirement — I put on _Halloween_ (1978, dir. [of course!] John Carpenter). Recall that first scene featuring the antagonist POV!

This one doesn’t seem to frighten Vicky so much. She finds Michael Myers cliché. The movies allow me to drown in the details. Credits roll through my head like they are the newest form of benzodiazepine, soft and endless, and I tell the trivial bits to my sister as she rolls her eyes at the score: “Victoria you’re missing it! This is such an incredible movie. Did you know Jamie Lee Curtis’s mother is in fact one Miss Janet Leigh, who played the leading lady in Alfred Hitchcock’s seminal 1960 horror masterpiece _Psycho_ — which maybe I should put that on next, if you haven’t seen it. Carpenter put her in the star role as the ultimate homage, which I think is genius. And the girls are all supposed to be in high school, right, but in fact JLC was the _only_ teenaged actor. . . .” Etc., etc., ad nauseam.

Then ninety minutes later I waste no time in switching on what is perhaps my all-time favorite film: _The Thing_. I watch Victoria all smug while I wait for the arctic to descend into gory chaos. When the dogs burst into slippery viscera she screams into my ear, and I cackle and say, “The practical effects, Vicky! Isn’t it beautiful?”

“I don’t think I can finish this, Ames. I don’t like body horror.”

“Oh come on, it’s not so bad! I love body horror. . . .”

When the man’s head falls from his body and sprouts spider legs from its mouth she buries her face in my shoulder, and I grow swollen. It’s hard to tell what does it for me, whether it’s the blood or her body. Both have done it for me in the past. Maybe it’s a certain combination. After it’s over I tell her I have to wash up before we head out, and use the showerhead.

_SUMMER ANECDOTE II_

Victoria’s birthday is in the summer. This year I spent all the money I’d scrounged the previous couple months on something special. Note: this vignette is another bit of my life for which (for now) you’ll have to withhold your judgement. 

I bought her a stuffed bear, the kind she was obsessed with when she was younger. This was, of course, a stuffed bear in which the manufacturer had placed a little camera. She hugged me when she pulled it from its box. She placed it in the perfect spot without prompting. Dean came over a lot this summer. I wondered, while I waited for the camera to catch them, what it would be like to have the libidinal impulse satisfied instead of stifled. I wondered if it would vanish, after just one act of catharsis, and become like hunger and not constant thirst. I only had audio. The peephole was in place by then, but was far too risky. So I listened to them and ate Hershey’s Kisses as an alternative to the real thing.

And after I was sure I’d obtained enough footage I snuck in while she was out and gave the smiling bear something of an -ectomy. I uploaded the dark shots and played all the files in a row. This was not, to be clear, pornography. There was nothing at all erotic in the video, nothing titillating in his quick bursts which seemed to lose steam quickly. The squeaky animal sounds she made split my ears and nearly killed me. Perhaps that was the point. The only words she spoke were variations on his name: “Dean Dean Dean,” etc., which became in repetition: “Need need need need need.”

_HALLOWEEN, HOUSE PARTY_

I go as a non-sexy nurse. Vicky comes out of her room in a shimmering stars-and-stripes minidress plus a lasso: Wonder Woman. The sight of so much of her thighs invalidates the shower. Wonder is right. Dean arrives to pick us up in a red cadillac, which is a little on the nose, isn’t it? Out of courtesy — to include me — he lets me sit up front, and her with smooth legs out in the backseat. 

I go, “So what’s your costume?”

And he goes, “I am Iron Man,” and leans over to lift the red and yellow mask from his bag.

I say, “You know, Iron Man and Wonder Woman are from different universes.”

“Amy,” says Victoria, “ _you’re_ from a different universe,” which is true enough, and we all laugh.

Dean’s house is the teen movie scene to round out my teen movie routine. Stylized lighting across smuggled vodka and beer in cases and kegs. As soon as they’re inside V and D are dancing. I set down my stethoscope (isn’t it only doctors who have stethoscopes?) and find somewhere to hide. By pure chance I stumble into Dean’s childhood bedroom. He’s got lots and lots of books on psychology, and I can’t tell whether this fact is endearing or terrifying. I lie on his bed and sniff the unmade sheets and gag. Any good nurse has sedatives handy, and here are mine, just to steady my hands.

A little later Vicky comes to find me. She’s got a clear glass of something amber and bubbling. She takes a long swallow from it before saying: “Ames, what are you doing in here?”

“Waiting,” I say. “Waiting.”

“Amy I don’t want to be rude, but do you have any friends?”

“You’re my friend, aren’t you?”

“I’m your sister. You can’t be friends with someone to whom you’re related.”

“That’s cynical. Plus we aren’t really related.”

“I don’t know,” she says, “I find you pretty relatable,” and collapses beside me on the bed, and some of her drink splashes onto my scrubs. The ceiling fan spins and spins. I reach over to grab the beverage and she lets me have it, and as quick as a magician I slip a sprinkle-sized pill into it, and it dissolves in an instant. After I’ve taken my mousy sip I give it back and she sits up and kills it. Soon she’s snoring. 

I don’t know why. Curiosity, maybe. I take another Ativan myself and put my legs on either side of her waist and brush her hair out of her face. It is a perfect sort of intimacy to watch someone sleep. I put my index finger in her mouth. I run my thumb along her red and swollen lips, and then along the center of her neck. I entertain for a second what it would be like to strangle and/or smother her — because she certainly deserves it. This isn’t beautiful at all, I’m thinking. I’m thinking: this is disgusting. Amy, _you_ are disgusting. There is no beauty. There is only lust and loneliness and other forces beyond my control, and I don’t have the strength to tell you otherwise.

When I bend down to lick her face and kiss her chin (never her lips!) is when Dean, of course, makes his entrance.

He’s shocked for a second but is quick to move once he understands, and after he fails to wake Vicky grabs my wrist and yanks me into the backyard, which has, as if to kill the high school drama aesthetic, no pool. He says, “What the fuck?”

“Sorry,” I say. “I don’t know why I did that. I think I’m drunk.”

“I haven’t seen you take one drink. Did you drug her?”

“I drugged her.”

“Why?”

“I guess . . . I thought she would look pretty, sleeping.”

“Christ. I didn’t know it was this bad.”

“How bad did you think it was?”

“I see the way you look at her, at me — so I thought it was pretty goddamn bad. Jesus I’m about to call the police.”

“Please don’t,” I say, and sob a performative sob. “Please. I don't know what I was thinking. It was a lapse. A lapse! Please it will never happen again. Please don’t tell anyone. Please don’t tell her, especially don’t tell her. Anyone but her.”

He looks for a second like he’ll hit me, but thinks better of it. He says, “Amy, you are so fucking ugly it hurts.” And walks off.

I think: both Michael Myers and Humbert Humbert killed men who got between them and their respective girls. Human or not, death is the only end.

_MOTHER_

When I witnessed the adoptive Primal Scene, Carol was saying — yelling — to Mark as he thrust into her weakly: “Mark, baby, if you don’t finish quick I will slit your throat.” And sure enough he did finish fairly quick. I’ve come, since then, to understand this attitude toward sex is her attitude toward life in general.

_AN ARGUMENT_

Thanksgiving arrives with no other Halloween night type incident in the intervening time. My aunt and uncle and cousins come for dinner. Mark makes an exceptional Thanksgiving dinner, stuffing spewing from a turkey which shines like a bowling ball. We laugh and argue and argue and laugh.

Then after pumpkin pie and apple pie Vicky goes, “Ames, can I speak with you a second?” and drags me into the bathroom. “Amy,” she says, “so Crystal was asking me if I had an extra set of shoelaces since a rat, apparently, on the train over here stole her shoelace while she wasn’t looking. So I said you might have some, and so I went in your room—”

“Don’t do that!”

“And I went into your closet—”

“Don’t do that, either!”

“And I found this Box. . . .”

“Fucking goddamnit, Vicky!”

“So you know what was in this Box? It was personal items, Ames. _My_ personal items. Like the sort of things you’d find in a shrine a stalker made for you, you know what I mean? Which worried me! Dean’s been starting sentences recently like, “Vic’, there’s something I have to tell you about Amy,’ and then going, ‘Nevermind.’ I didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but . . .”

“I don’t know what’s in my closet. I hardly ever go in there.”

“So you didn’t put those things in that Box on purpose?”

“No! It must’ve been Carol. Storing keepsakes where she shouldn’t have.”

“Amy, if you’re like jealous or something you can tell me. Or if you’re angry . . . or lonely . . .”

“I’m not!”

“Okay. If you insist. I did take said items back.”

“Fine. Why would I care?”

“No reason. Okay. Well, I think I’ll sleep. Tryptophan, you know.”

I have difficulty sleeping despite the heavy digestion.

_BEACH_

Brockton Bay has beaches! It is a bay, after all. After finals Vicky convinces me to attend a semester-end party on one of these beaches. She says, “Dean’s whole cadre’ll be there. And I think Dennis has a crush on you.”

I say, “It’s too cold to go to the beach.”

And she says, “We’ll build a bonfire.” And she pats my back when she says this, and how can I say no? Dennis comes to pick us up and I sit in the back this time. Beaches here are cold and gray all year long, and a dip in the water no matter when will send you no matter what to the hospital. The darkness tonight is crisp like an unbitten apple. It feels as though the sky will fall on us any second. The bonfire’s going strong by the time we three arrive, and by its dancing light I can see there are wild horses by the pier, whinnying in their dreams. 

I sit with the other coat-clad teens and bite my tongue. Dennis does indeed attempt to touch me, and I turn him down as harshly as is possible without speaking. He puts his hand over the purplish fire like he’s checking if he still feels. Carlos tells this ghost story about a house that eats people, and after he’s finished I say I wish I were the evil house, and we all laugh, and I grin for having accomplished something. I take my shoes off and put my toes near the fire so they won’t fall off. 

As the conversation dies down Dean gives me this glare and — still looking at me — puts his mouth on Victoria’s. It’s sloppy, and the awkward silence is no deterrent. He stares at me the whole time, even as he pushes his hand under her t-shirt. Everyone’s watching. At a certain point I can’t take it anymore, and I get up and head for the staticky sea. It is black like onyx glass. I hear Vicky begin to moan. When the water touches the soles of my feet metal shoots up my spine but I do not stop. When it’s at my knees I hear her go, “Amy!” in pleasure. When it’s at my waist I hear her go “Amy!” in fear. Just before my ears go under I hear, even from the impossible horses, a cheer big enough to swallow the planet.


End file.
